Identification of Dominant Equivalent Circuit Elements of Voltammetric Sensor System

The elements of an electrical circuit are said to carry the information (behavior) of the circuit itself. The equivalent circuit of a system may therefore be considered to capture the characteristic information of the system. This work considers the equivalent electrical circuit model of the voltammetric sensor system and treats the circuit parameters as features of the black tea samples under analysis. Further, the work proposes the identification of the dominant feature set that is primarily responsible for the quality (taste) determination of black tea. To access the performance of the reduced (identified) feature set, theaflavin (TF), an important taste-determining compound in black tea, has been correlated with the individual circuit parameters. In this direction, a study has been done to relate the variation of circuit parameters in alignment with the TF content in the given tea samples. The regression analysis with the reduced feature sets shows that the prediction accuracy of TF is higher even when some of the circuit elements were not considered as features. This concludes that the majority of information of the analyte is captured only within a few circuit parameters rather than the entire circuit. As the circuit parameters are directly related to the electrochemical process involved, the analysis also gives an idea of the extent to which a particular phenomenon determines the characteristics of the analyte.